The history of demo programming
on the STby Stefan Posthuma (a.k.a. Digital Insanity
of The Lost Boys)

It all started in the spring of 1986 when a
couple of computer freaks from Germany came together. Erik Simon
and Udo Fischer bought an ST and started exploring this hot, new
machine. They fooled around a bit using Basic (and noticed how
bad "Atari ST Basic" was), but soon ended up with a
program called "Seka", coding their first assembly
language programs. Soon after the first scrolling message
appeared on their screens, they formed a group and called
themselves "The Exceptions" or TEX. Erik Simon called
himself ES, and dedicated himself to drawing the various graphics
needed for their demos. Udo adapted the name -ME-, and three
other people joined them: Michael (Daryl), Gunther (6719, after
his zip code) and last but not least, Jochen Hippel (Mad Max), a
young and very talented music programmer. There was a person
named Alyssa associated with TEX for a while but he left after
their first demo I believe. In the very beginning, they still did
some cracking of games software, adding their demo screens to the
loaders of these games. But soon they realized that programming
demos only is a lot more fun and a bit less illegal so they
stopped cracking and dedicated themselves to demos.

The definitive breakthrough for TEX came with
their "Little Colour Demo" in the fall of 1987. This
was the first full-fledged demo with rasters, scrolling messages
and music. They found out how to use the various timers in the ST
to create special colour effects. Also, Mad Max had written a
routine that was able to read Rob Hubbard's Commodore 64 sound
files and play them on the ST. "LCD" was the first demo
with full music, rasters and scrollers. The demo era had begun.
After "LCD", Alyssa discovered how to fool the MMU into
opening the lower border. TEX used this technique for the first
time in their "NeoChrome Picture Slide Show" which had
NeoChrome pictures occupying the whole screen, and a scrolling
message in the lower border. This amazed quite a few people I can
tell you (including myself, I was totally ignorant as to machine
code programming on the ST at that time and still fooling around
in monochrome with "GfA Basic"). This demo also showed
us by the way, that ES was quite a talented graphics man.

Now TEX weren't the only ones at that time. More
demo crews were forming, Michael Bittner started the TNT crew,
the Delta Force was brought to life and a couple of Swedish
enthusiasts became The CareBears. The TNT crew started bringing
samples into the demos, the "Lovespy Demo" (September
1987) being an example of this. The ST scene was really shocked
by the release of the "B.I.G. Demo" (Best In Galaxy) by
TEX in January 1988. It was huge, it was brilliant, it was
insane. 113 different pieces of music (never equalled after
this), five different screens and the first three-voice digital
music ever. It actually had a main menu where you could choose
your music or another demo screen, something unheard of before
this. The three "Psych-O-Screens" all consisted of
clever colour tricks, and the "Big Scroller" really
showed what the ST was capable of (at that time of course). This
established TEX as the undisputed masters of demo programming on
the ST. Also, the massive amount of music and the presence of a
"Digital Department" showed that Mad Max had a lot up
his sleeve. By the way, around this time the first Bitmap
Brothers game ("Xenon") was released by Melbourne
House. By that time a disk magazine called "ST NEWS"
started becoming more and more popular and the editor/ founder
(Richard Karsmakers) of this magazine who wrote the scrolltext
for the demo had some good contacts with the people from TEX.
This resulted in TEX visiting Holland in March 1988, when they
finished the "Amiga Demo". This demo contained some
four voice digitized musics ported from the Amiga by Mad Max. It
also had an "Overscan Screen" that removed the lower
border as well as the right border, something totally new then.

I was there during this visit being a close
friend of Richard and it was a very inspiring weekend for sure.
It was the first real "computer orgy" I attended.
All-night coding, pizza-annihilation and the consumption of
insane amounts of Coca-Cola. Loud music on the stereo and the
deafening roars of frustrated programmers, pissed off by their
STs crashing. It was quite a revelation to someone as innocent as
I was at that time. I believe I had to leave early though, I had
a girlfriend waiting for me. This also saw the creation of the
first "Real Time" article ever for "ST NEWS"
- an article in which the people present give random comments on
the events, with the exact time of these comments, portraying a
life-like and accurate report of what is going on.

The next important demo to be released after the
"Amiga Demo" was the "FNIL" (Fantastic New
Interactive Largest) demo by the TNT Crew. This featured some
great coding, full-screen scrolling, massive amounts of colours
and rasters and a whopping seven different demo screens. Also at
that time, the first Level 16 demo saw the light of day, Level 16
being two highly talented programmers from Germany, friends of
TEX. Things quieted down a little after this. I took over the
editorship and programming of the "ST NEWS" disk
magazine by the end of 1988, and "ST NEWS" Volume 3
Issue 4 saw the release of my first demo. A one-plane (ROXL)
scrolline with rasters and a for- and background. The year 1988
also saw the release of Jeff Minter's "Trip-A-Tron" a
truly cosmic experience.

Then, in January 1989, one of the most impressive
and amazing demos ever was released. "The Union Demo".
The Union was the result of a joining of demo crews. TEX teamed
up with the TNT Crew, The CareBears, Level 16, the Replicants (a
cracker crew from France, the first French crew to get
well-known) and the Delta Force. "The Union Demo" had
it all. Superb coding, the first ever no-border demo screen
(called fullscreen) by Level 16, solid 3D vectors by the TNT
crew, digisounds and megascrollers by The CareBears, an
interactive menu (move the man to different doors where the demos
can be found), loader screens etc., etc. This was it. Everybody
thought this to be the ultimate demo, something never to be
equalled. Well, in a sense this is true. "The Union
Demo" is a true classic, making a heavy impact on the demo
world. "The Union Demo" contained a few screens by The
CareBears, including the 3D-sinus-and-a-whollottamore-stuff (or
something) scroller which is considered by most people to be the
best demo screen ever written. With their screens the CareBears
established themselves once and forever and their coder Nic
(Niclas Thissel) was to become a living legend afterwards.

In January 1989, the "Swedish New Year
Demo" was released too, showing the world that there was
more to Sweden than just The CareBears. Crews like Omega and Sync
are also forces to be reckoned with. In the beginning of 1989,
another demo crew emerged from anonymity. They had produced some
digi-demos and a demo called the "Power Demo", but the
"DEF" (Definitive) demo was their first big demo. With
this remarkable demo, the Lost Boys of London became quite
famous. The most impressive thing about the Lost Boys were their
ages: Spaz (Dave Moss, graphics man), Sprog (Marc Palmer, coder)
and Sammy Joe (Michael Schüssler - he is a German who at the
time lived in England, their PR dude) were all 15 when this demo
was released. Their main coder called Manikin (Tim Moss, Dave's
brother) was 18. The funny thing is that Manikin started coding
68000 on the ST after reading an article in "ST NEWS"
about scrolling in machine code that I had written. That summer,
Richard and myself travelled through England for three weeks,
visiting most of the well-known games programmers and companies,
gathering stories and interviews for our "ST NEWS"
magazine. During these three weeks, we also visited the Lost Boys
and had a most amusing time in London with them. It was there
that Tim (Manikin) told me about his plans for their next Mega
Demo and asked if I were interested to do some screens for it.

But a lot of things were
going on in Germany too, TEX was fed up with doing demos and
wanted to program some games. This finally resulted in the
founding of Thalion Software, a games company based around all
the members of TEX plus their friends (TNT crew, Level 16). Hopes
were high, never before had so many gifted programmers and
graphics people been in the same company. They produced their
first games, but due to marketing and management problems these
games never became the success they could have become. But
nevertheless, Thalion was a magic thing, every demo programmer
dreamed of one day working for them and programming a game for
them. Richard and I visited them around the end of the summer and
I must say that the atmosphere in that office was indeed magical,
and inspiration coursed through my veins as I sat there watching
these people work. I even thought about leaving my job and
joining them instead. In the end I decided against this, SPC
being too interesting (and promising) a company to leave at that
time.

Back to The CareBears. They had not been sitting
around, but had been programming like maniacs. An Cool, Jas, Nic
(all coders) and Tanis (graphics) created the
"Whattaheck" demo. This was actually a compilation of
Swedish demo screens gathered at a large demo-party in Sweden.
One of these screens was very amazing. A no-border screen with
full-screen scrolling!! Everybody was quite stupefied until the
news came through. Nic had found a way to make the hardware
scroll the screen. "Sync Scrolling" they called it. How
it worked nobody knew, but it was to create quite a stir... It didn't last long before Thalion released their
first game using this technique, "Leavin' Teramis", a
vertical scrolling game. Richard quit his biology studies to join
Thalion to work as a games-designer/ copywriter/ PR person, and I
believe he worked on this one too.

In August of 1989, the first all-dutch demo was
released. A group called "Aenigmatica" released their
"Genysys" demo (I just mentioned this one to soothe my
feelings of Dutch pride and joy...).

The end of 1989 also saw the next
"super" demo. This was the first one to be compared to
"The Union Demo", a true piece of wonderful
programming. It were The CareBears again who did it with their
"Cuddly Demos". In this they exploited their "Sync
Scrolling" to the max, creating a full and smooth scrolling
main menu that managed to baffle quite a few people. It also
contained a record amount of demo screens, one more amazing than
the other. All this by four people, a true achievement. Their
"Spreadpoint" demo (taken from the Amiga though) with
the many little scrollines inspired many demos to come, and the
main menu of "Cuddly Demos" can be found in many
varieties today. Also, the graphics in this one showed that Tanis
wasn't without his talents either.

The Swedes did one more thing after this, the
"Swedish New Year Demo 1990", and another Dutch crew
named Galtan Six released their "Mega Demo". If you
boot this one in monochrome, you get a little screen by yours
truly (I must have been the only person insane enough to write
monochrome stuff. I did it for "ST NEWS", really). Then
the attention was shifted to the Lost Boys when they released
their "Mind Bomb" demo in April 1990. This was another
memorable demo with a sync-scrolling main menu (much like
"Cuddly Demos" I have to admit) and quite a few
innovative screens. Like the "Red Sector" demo, after
the famous 3D vectorballs from the Amiga (There was one demo
before this that featured these vectorballs, I can't remember
which one though, it was from Sweden). It also featured some
screens written by myself, I was quite happy to get them in
there. "Mind Bomb" was well-written with lots of great
screens. Sprog left the Lost Boys soon after "DEF Demo"
so Manikin had to do all the programming on this one. It also
featured a screen by the British BBC (Bad Brew Crew). This demo
also started a "Bear Bashing" trend, one of the first
things you see after booting this demo is a large boxing glove
crushing a cute Care Bear. This was a friendly joke though, we
have always been good friends with the CareBears.

The summer of 1990 was very intense. Tim and Dave (Manikin and Spaz from the Lost
Boys) came over to work for Thalion, programming their first
game, designed by Richard, named "A Prehistoric Tale".
During this time, Nic from The CareBears was also working there
on a game called "Enchanted Land", a full and
supersmooth scrolling platform game. Personally, I think this is
the most technically complex game on the ST yet. This
sync-scrolling brings problems that many people don't think of
like not being able to do screen-swapping thus having to work out
complex sprite handlers if you want to keep things nice and
smooth (The whole game runs in one VBL). "Enchanted
Land" (named after a Sodom song, Richard came up with this
one) was released just after the summer and "A Prehistoric
Tale" was released that Christmas. But Thalion still had
(and still has) management problems so both games didn't do very
well I am afraid. Thalion became more and more unpopular,
resulting in Richard quitting in the beginning of 1991, and one
of their top programmers (Marc Rosocha, the one responsible for
games like "Last Ninja" and "Wings of Death")
left them to form his own company, Eclipse Software Design. One
of their graphics people, Thorsten Mutchall, joined The CareBears
as GoGo. He is one of the most talented graphics people around
these days and he has done graphics for games like
"Spherical" and is currently working on Thalion's
"Amberstar II", a role-playing adventure game.

At the end of his stay at
Thalion, Manikin decided to do a little demo with all the friends
he had there. A guy called Oxygene
(he was working at Thalion on a version of "Galaga", a
project that was never finished, and he had previously
done the "ST NEWS" Volume 4 Issue 4 demo under the name
In Flagranti) joined The Lost Boys - and so did I. Together with
a guy from the Replicants, Daryl from TEX and Blue Devil from the
Gigabyte crew (they had been around since the old days) and the
new ULM (ULtimate Matricks) from Luxembourg we did "Life's a
Bitch". Tim did a very fast (and very cheating) solid 3D
screen just to annoy Nic (some talk was going on about the new
CareBears demo, it would feature some amazing 3D and some more
astonishing stuff) and the others contributed their screens. Mad Max made the now famous "Bittner
Mix" and the demo was released at the 1990 Atari Düsseldorf
Messe. I remember Tim finishing it right there with a lot
of people waiting for their copy. Some people even asked us to
sign disks, something we found quite amusing.

During this time we also met The Respectables
from Trier, Germany. A swell bunch of people who were to become
very good friends of ours. After Nic went
home, we had the "Fax Wars" with TCB, sending faxes
between Thalion and Sweden, with the most amazing drawings of
Mutant CareBears slaughtering Lost Boys and Lost Boys sodomizing
CareBears. This would reach its highlight in the last demo
by the Lost Boys, "Ooh Crikey Wot a Scorcher". From
Sweden came the "Sowatt" demo, another demo made after
a large party in Sweden where people contributed their screens.
It featured a lot of screens (including some from my good friends
in Norway) and possibly the best one was the "Grodan and
Kvack Kvack" demo by (who else) Nic from the CareBears. It
was a very intense demo with lots of one-plane graphics flying
around the place. Again, a conversion from an Amiga demo. This
one-plane business resulted in a brief trend, but it quickly
stopped for these demos weren't very pretty to look at.

At that time, The Inner Circle from England
released their "Decade Demo". Unfortunately, these
people had taken up a grudge against the Lost Boys and found it
necessary to spill forth lots of accusations and allegations
against us. Apparently, we had stolen their source code and used
it in our "Mind Bomb" screens. We had no idea and found
the whole business a bit strange to say the least. But
"Decade Demo" still was quite a good demo with some
nice screens.

During the summer of 1990 I got the idea to
organize a large demo party in Holland somewhere. Holland is
quite central here in Europe so everybody could come. So they
did, and in the weekend before christmas the office of SPC (the
company I work for) was crammed full of over 120 computer freaks
having a great time. Everybody attended (except Inner Circle...),
and it was a great success. A massive 45 crates of Coca Cola were
consumed and this four-day hacker party was one of the most
intense experiences of my life. We made a video out of the whole
thing, something I watch with mixed feelings of horror and
amusement sometimes. We also did some competitions, a demo
competition that was won by The Lost Boys, a graphics competition
that was won by GoGo from The CareBears and a 3.5 K
"Remember VIC20" demo competition that was won by The
Delta Force for their full working two-player version of
"Archon". You have to see this to believe it. At this
party, Delta Force released their "Syntax Terror" demo,
another demo with a lot of screens from different crews. These
screens were gathered at the ICC #1 (International Coding
Conference #1) held in Stuttgart in the beginning of the summer
of 1990. It took them quite a long time to finish it but they are
forgiven for it is a good demo (introducing the first "mini-games"
to be included in a demo).

ULM also released their brilliant "Dark Side
of the Spoon". ULM are well-known for their technical
abilities and their fullscreens. Nearly all the screens from this
demo are fullscreens and it is very impressive indeed. I can
still remember them locking themselves up in a little room
somewhere in the office to finish the demo. A month after the
convention the ceiling of this room collapsed. Whether or not
there is any connection between their intense programming and
this is not known... This "Dark Side of the Spoon" demo
contained guest screens by The Respectables (their first screen
to be published) and The Lost Boys, a screen finished at the
convention by Manikin and Oxygene.

The Overlanders from France also released their
"European Demos" at the party. A two-disk demo with a
massive amount of screens, and a main menu so big you can get
lost in it. One of the best screens in this one is the amazing 3D
screen by Ziggy Stardust and Mcoder.

At the beginning of 1991,
an ex-Aenigmatica member (as a matter of fact Jurie Horneman
a.k.a. Relayer of the Quartermass Experiment, I'll have you know)
joined Thalion to work on their "Amberstar" project.
It also saw the release of the first game by Eclipse Software,
"Monster Business", a game programmed by Lost Boys
member Oxygene.

The summer of 1991 was very busy once again. My
fellow Lost Boys (Tim and Dave) came over once more and we all
went to the home of one of the Respectables (Tyrem or Kimmi as we
call him, his real name is Stefan Kimmlingen). We intended to do
another game and sell it to Eclipse Software but we did another
demo instead. "Ooh Crikey Wot a Scorcher" was born and
this is the last demo of the Lost Boys. It featured an animation
of a Lost Boy sawing a Care Bear in two with a chainsaw (with
lots of samples from Bad Taste) which is left unanswered by TCB
sofar. I also did a screen together with Oxygene, "Your mind
is my Ashtray" with a large rotating scroller made out of
rotated squares. This demo also has a quite unique main menu in
which you fly through a fractal-landscape and land on various
spots to get to the demo screens. "Ooh Crikey"
contained one guest screen by The Respectables. This was the last
TLB demo however, everybody is too busy doing games or working.
Manikin has worked on a game that is loosely based on the main
menu of "Ooh Crikey". It even got him to sign contracts
with a very interesting software company but eventually the whole
thing was put on ice due to recession (and possibly other reasons
noone can fathom). He's currently doing a summer of programming
for the company where I work. But I'm going too fast here! The
summer of 1991 also had the second Delta Force convention, ICC
#2. Again everybody attended and we had a great time over in
Stuttgart. Another gigantic real time article was written here
and published in "ST NEWS". At this convention, ULM and
Elektra (a new demo crew from Sweden) joined the Union and they
want to make a new Union Demo so I have heard (which has yet to
be released). The summer ended with the Atari Düsseldorf Messe
(almost a tradition), everybody getting together once more. After
this we all went home, tired but very satisfied...

The last big demo I received after this was
"Punish Your Machine", another compilation of screens
that people brought to the Delta Force ICC #2. It is a large
two-disk demo with screens by many demo crews, including the new
Elektra, a "plasma" screen by the Overlanders, a screen
by TEX (what?) and a lot more. Eclipse released their
"Lethal Xcess - Wings of Death II", another
high-quality shoot-them-up with "Xenon II" ambitions
that Richard was insanely enthusiastic about.

Well, that about covers it. There is more though,
what about the new CareBears demo that everybody is waiting for?
How about Thalion? Or forthcoming Mega Parties in Europe? And
what about this Froggy Demo that should be there soon (or
already)? The story may yet gather courage to continue. Wait and
see. Watch this space...

This text was published in the Atari
ST diskmag "ST News" and is used by kind
permission of Richard Karsmakers. Source for this
article: http://www.st-news.com